


Shed a Tear

by write_light



Category: Southland
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Hallucinations, M/M, Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-20
Updated: 2013-06-20
Packaged: 2017-12-15 13:25:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/850040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/write_light/pseuds/write_light
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Southland cops know that death is part of life.  John Cooper discovered a way to balance the two.  Written as speculation on the final episode and Cooper's fate.  A companion piece to "<a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/237797">In Restless Dreams</a>".  Spoilers for episode 5x10.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shed a Tear

**Author's Note:**

> Written as speculation on the final episode and Cooper's fate.  A companion piece to "[In Restless Dreams](http://archiveofourown.org/works/237797)".  Spoilers for episode 5x10.

   
He lay there, feeling blood trickle down the back of his throat.  

_Shot, and my nose bleeds too.  Fuck._

Overhead, the tall palm rustled, the chopper beam flickering behind the fronds then blinding him again.  

_It's so goddamned dry. Good time to go, before that wind gets here._

He knew what he was doing - "suicide by cop" - he'd seen it enough, he'd lost part of himself in a moment like this, and now it was back.  That day, John had felt the life surge down his arm with the pulse of his blood; the quick, tight spasm of his finger sent it racing through the trigger into the bullet, then into the meth-riddled kid running wild at him with a knife. Now, at last, it was back inside him, that bit of life.  It was a cheap trick on death's part, he thought.

He was stealing it back now, and he could die in balance, his life restored to him in the bullet just below his heart.  He knew the cop who shot him was running low, just a drop or two low, but that’s how life goes.  

***

Laurie sobbed, of course.  For her fucking asshole neighbors and their loud fucking generator.  For the child she wanted, and didn't want.  For the husband she'd had, and never had.  She sobbed for a long time, but that was a given.

***

Hicks cried for a friend lost, a man who saved him, and a debt unpaid, the worst kind.  

He heard it on his new phone, just hooked up – a landline for a dinosaur – and his first call was about John. He put the phone down gently and gripped the table, to hold himself up, then to tear the table in half, if he could have.  A tear fell and glistened on the dark wood in a shaft of sunlight.

He'd spent a day handcuffed to John's house, watching the hours pass and the sun move from window to window, first pale and clouded, then brilliant LA white, then smog-soaked golden brown.  He'd been sad, and enraged, and curious in the end.  He reached as far as the cuffs would go, twisting himself to touch anything he could.  On the third try, he caught sight of a photo on the staircase wall, a woman in uniform, young, her nose just like John's.  It was a military uniform she wore.  Next to it was a faint variation in the wall's color, the same size rectangle as hers.  She'd kept his father there despite everything; John removed him for good.

***

Tang cried for a partner she trusted, a partner in splitting hairs, in broad gestures and the postures of hypocrisy.  

They got along better after they admitted how much they hated each other.  The tear escaped her eye and she ravaged it out of existence, dragging her fingernail across her cheek and feeling an edge she'd missed in her home manicure.

Another tear escaped during morning briefing when she read the news, and she let it roll down.  It hung from her lip as she stared at the bulletin on the table.  She looked up at the silent faces and the tear slid into her mouth, tasting so salty.   

***

Lydia cried and couldn't tell herself why, except that her son would never know John Cooper and that was a loss that had never even happened, so why was she crying?  A siren wailed, an ambulance somewhere close, and it woke the baby, and he howled.

She had spent five minutes with Cooper - why did it cut into her?  She heard herself tell him to look at his life from above, she heard him bullshit her with "Nothing," heard the crack in his voice as he pushed her away, and then the oddest embrace of a word, "Sulfur."  She replayed it and each time she heard the pain and need more clearly, and each time Christopher shrieked his way into her concentration until he replaced John, and she got up to find him, to hold him, to cry with him.

***

Dewey cried when he touched his gun the next day.  Not when he heard, not that night when his daughter cried as he stumbled in drunk, not when he put on his badge and put away the bottle forever.  

There was something about his gun, about all the guns he touched, that prickled under his fingers.  He felt the rough texture of the grip, the worn spot under the trigger.  He put it back down three times.

Dewey knew John sucked cock, and boy, did he try not to think about it.  He assumed everyone knew, and he thought John knew he knew, so he never stopped being an asshole. If he stopped, John would think it mattered to Dewey.  What mattered, apart from being the best asshole the department could remember, was how steady John was, and how warm.  Dewey had his hands on people on a regular basis, and John was always warm.  The gun, when he finally picked it up the fourth time, was still cold.

***

Cesar cried when he picked up the bouquet.  He cried when he read it in the paper, but that was just shock.  He cried when he stood on the sidewalk and looked at their garden, still alive.  That was pain, and he fled from it.  But the flowers in his hands, they smelled like spice and lavender, like the garden they'd planted together, like the soap he brought with him every time he came back, even that last time.  He smelled it again, the same mix that was on John's pillow, and it was love that made him cry in a florist's shop on La Cienega.  

***

Ben was in the hospital.  

"He asked for you," the nurse said, but Ben never let himself believe that.

Ben woke every night, either from his head splitting with pain, or coughing on the dry air, or a car backfiring.  John was there for three days, and Ben never cried.

Ben sat bolt upright every time John appeared, and looked at him lying there in the bed.  Blood spread out in half-circles, red across the white sheets, all along his back.  It spotted his pillow too, from somewhere beneath his head.  Ben watched him, watched the blood spreading across the sheets toward him.  It was the only thing that ever moved.  Every morning it was gone, and the sheets were white again, and Ben was whiter.

The last night was the same as the first. John lay on the white sheets, naked but for his underwear, his broad back and solid body turned away from the door on his side, round ass and thick thighs, his feet crossed awkwardly.  That third night, John spoke, still bleeding, still turned away.  Nothing of import.

"You sound good, John."  It was crazy and wrong and all he could think to say.

"I do, don't I?"  John replied.

***

END


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